Kings Canyon National Park United States

Legendary

Home to 14,000 foot peaks, high mountain meadows, and some of the largest trees in the world.

Photo by Jeff Hollett

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Every December, a crowd gathers around one giant sequoia in this park and holds a Christmas ceremony. The tradition has run since 1926, when President Calvin Coolidge named it the Nation's Christmas Tree.

It's the General Grant Tree, and it holds a second honor no other living thing has. In 1956, President Eisenhower declared it a national shrine to Americans who died in war.

The tree stands 268 feet tall, about as high as a 27-story building. It's the second largest tree in the world, measured by the volume of its trunk.

For a long time people thought it was the biggest. Careful measurements in 1931 showed the General Sherman Tree in nearby Sequoia National Park was slightly larger.

Loggers were cutting down sequoias across this region in the 1800s. To stop it, Congress protected the grove on October 1, 1890, and named it General Grant National Park.

It was tiny, just a few square miles around the big trees. It stayed that way for fifty years.

Meanwhile people argued about protecting the huge canyons to the east. The photographer Ansel Adams helped settle it.

He published a book of his photographs of the region in 1938 and sent a copy to the Secretary of the Interior, who passed it to President Franklin D. Roosevelt.

On March 4, 1940, Congress created Kings Canyon National Park. General Grant National Park was folded into it and became known as Grant Grove.

The park now covers over 460,000 acres, most of it wilderness. Kings Canyon itself is one of the deepest canyons in North America.

Walk the paved third-of-a-mile loop to the General Grant Tree, easy enough for almost anyone. Step inside the Fallen Monarch, a hollow sequoia trunk that has served as a cabin, a hotel, a saloon, and a horse stable. Drive the Kings Canyon Scenic Byway down into the canyon itself, with granite walls rising thousands of feet on either side.